The Online Photographer

I've done a little more exploring at Black & WTF. Most (not all) of the photos seem to fall within one or more of a limited number of definable categories:

• Hijinks (people fooling around or making faces, etc.)
• Visual jokes
• Odd, funny, or unintended juxtapositions
• Unexpected situations
• Things that are too small or too large
• Making light of death
• Weird hair
• Sexual innuendo
• An odd apparatus, machine, or mechanical contrivance
• Inappropriateness
• Animals
• Strange, funny, ironic or unusual signs or labels
• Gender confusion or ambivalence
• Photographic tricks, collages, or pastiches
• Costumes or masks

After looking at a lot of them at one sitting, overall the pictures have a surfacey or superficial character that is initially appealing but becomes tiresome and repetitive eventually. Although they give me more to think about than the ubiquitous scenics that bore me out of my mind, I find them less appealing generally even than the somewhat similar "funny home video" genre, because the video versions generally contain a bit more context and narrative: you understand why the video was being made, and then you experience the unexpected event that transpired instead, which sometimes has a spontaneous character that would be difficult to stage and possibly also difficult to invent. (Although I suppose most of them are just people falling.)

Of course, with so many pictures on the site, there are good and bad pictures in most of the above categories. For instance, this picture goes in the "signs or labels" category...

...But it has a little more to it than most of the others. When Barthes called a photograph "a message without a code," what he meant, I think, was that pictures often tell part of a story very specifically without telling other parts at all; that is, they need context and a certain amount of interpretation for their meaning to become complete. The sign picture above is incongruous, and qualifies as unusual, like most of the others. But it also strongly suggests its context—it was probably a home or a business in a building or location that used to be a brothel but isn't any longer, and the people who live or work there were so frequently bothered by visitors looking for the brothel that a permanent sign dissuading them from persisting was felt to be warranted.

As such, the picture has all sorts of connotations and associations. It suggests the passage of time and the reassignation of real estate for different purposes, the emotions both of the people inside who don't want to be bothered and the state of the possible visitors, and, of course, at a little greater remove, all the associations of lonely people looking for anonymous sex and the people who provide it. It might bring up for the viewer similar situations in their own experience: for instance, I once bought a house where a known drug dealer had previously resided, and the police came by trying to serve warrants half a dozen times before I was finally able to convince them to stop. I could have used a sign explaining the situation on the door, I suppose.

What's most curious to me is that very few of the pictures at Black & WTF have the qualities that I look for in a good snapshot: either that sense of accidental visual grace or compositional felicity that great snapshots can have, or that unexpected whimsical or ambiguous element that adds an implied depth or mystery that in some sense transcends context.

Of course some of them do have something of those qualities. This one, for example, is a nice composition, and has a bit of unintended tension: the man was probably holding on to the tree to help him keep his footing, but it looks partly like he's pushing against it to help it fight the wind. Was it an intentional joke? Or just something the photographer noticed, before or after the exposure? There's that tension, too. But it's an authentic gesture: his aspect is inherent in his person and his situation, not just in the intentionality of the collaborators who made the photograph; you know the wind is real. It has a little less of the jokey quality of the general run of these pictures, and a little more of the quality of the snapshot that works.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Harry Lime: "Believe it or not I'm actually pretty certain that I know where that 'This is not a Brothel' sign is located, because I used to walk past it almost every day when I was working in London. The sign is in Soho on Mead Street and I'm pretty sure that I also took a picture of it at some point.... Soho used to be a red light district, but now it's been gentrified and is home to a large portion of the movie post production business.

"Here is a google maps link. Screen left. Sidewalk. There are three people walking towards camera, one of them is holding a brownish envelope (?). Behind them is a young girl in jeans, who looks like she is on the phone. She has just past the door, which is screen left from her, where the white faced building forms a corner with the gray-green brick faced building. I'm pretty certain that this is the correct location. It's been two years, but I seem to remember that the building is currently occupied by a law firm, which depending on your opinion of that profession may not infer much legitimacy to the accuracy of the sign...."

Mike replies: Now, now, no lawyer jokes. So, do we have any current Londoners who might be able to confirm?

UPDATE from timd: "Checked No. 7 Meard Street this lunchtime: the sign has gone."

In response to Geoff's book reviews yesterday, there were several comments critical of David Noton's style of landscape photograph; one reader derided it as "...meaningless landscape porn done by the old British Velvia brigade now all turned digital" (and then admitted that it's what he wants to do himself), and another called it "the padding of a thousand amateur photography magazines...proficient but shallow empty images that tell us nothing new about the world." (I'm not at all agreeing that this is how such work should be seen, merely reporting their reactions.)

Separately, several people attested to a dissatisfaction with pictures of ruins. Sean Keane referred us to a 2009 interview at On the Media, which again uses the word "porn" to disparage pictures indulgent of a concept—the article is entitled "Ruin Porn." Several other readers, independently, also used the p-word.

Curiously, I think all these dissenting voices are objecting to the same thing, regardless of whether they're talking about landscapes or ruins: a lack or failure of documentary objectivity.

Early on in my exploration of photography, I found myself disenchanted with conventional travel photography. The problem was that I had been places (my father loved to travel, and I did a lot of traveling early in my life—which I enjoyed, but which seems to have cured me of the conventional ambition to do more of it later in life). The problem was simply that most glossy books about places that are so often found in the bargain sections of chain bookstores just don't look like what you see when you go to those places yourself.

This is what people object to about the common fib of "pristine" landscape photographs that show the land as we imagine it to be in its natural state. (Actually, of course, most "unspoiled" or "natural" landscape does show the hand of Mankind—you just have to know what to look for.) They simply don't show the place as you'd experience it if you went there yourself. Such projects edit too much, select only one point of view.

It's also what Thomas Morton, in the "Ruin Porn" interview, objects to when he notes that

...one of the pictures...really, really evokes this desolation, but if you tilt the camera even just like a little bit to the right or to the left on one side [LAUGHS] there’s this really well-kept food factory building with a nicely manicured lawn out front, and the other way there’s an office building that when we [were] there everybody was out like eating their lunch; it was bustling. There was all this activity.

Again, same thing—the pictures don't look like what you'd experience if you went to the place yourself. They don't report on a place, they select their point of view a priori and then exclude everything that doesn't contribute to the impression.

By showing only the famous ruins of Detroit, you can make Detroit look like an unredeemed post-industrial wasteland, with ruin stretching as far as the eye can see. (Detroit's population has fallen by half in recent decades, which is sure to leave some ruins behind.) By showing only what Geoff himself refers to (in a comment) as "little slices of paradise," you're not getting a clear picture of the reality of the land in a landscape—even, in some case, of the place where the picture was made.

(Regarding that last, here's an anecdote I can't resist retelling: a teacher of mine, Frank DiPerna, once did a color landscape project with an 8x10 Deardorff of the desert southwest. At the opening, an attendee was admiring one of Frank's "pure" landscapes on the gallery wall and asked, "Now where was this taken?" And Frank answered "Not more than a hundred steps from the trunk of the car." In other words, all those pristine landscapes had roads nearby.)

There are even little tricks that you can play to make the point-of-view seem more pervasive than it is. Relative to Detroit ruins, Morton notes that there are really only a few big famous ruins in Detroit: the old Packard plant (abandoned in 1957), the train station, and the Fisher Body plant.

There would be one picture that was an interior, and it would say Packard Auto Plant; you know, the caption would explain what the photo was. And then there would be another one that was taken right outside the Packard Auto Plant, but instead of referencing the plant, it would say "Bellevue Avenue," which is where the Packard Auto Plant is located. And then they repeated that at the Fisher Body Plant, went outside, and it was still—it's still a shot of the plant but it says "Hasting Avenue."

There's nothing wrong with slice-of-paradise landscapes, nor with photographs of ruins—it's just wise to bear in mind that the operative mode in play is "art," not "documentary."

And my parting shot—if you happen to be one of those who naturally feels a little suspicious of idealized landscapes, I have the perfect antidote for you, courtesy of Bill Poole. It's a short video by and about Guggenheim Award winner Michael Berman.

The video, called "Wilderness Photographer," is from High Country News. Short, and worthwhile. I like his landscapes, and I like his thoughts about landscape. It's the first I've heard of Michael Berman. Has anybody seen his book?

Mike

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Featured Comment by Craig Lee: "It is an interesting point. As a matter of fact, today CNN has a web article along a similar vein. The article is about how hotels' marketing images don't tell the full story, are framed to look better/bigger than they are, and even staged so beaches look pristine. Different subject, but really a similar theme to this post."

Brochure photo on left, more typical scene on the right. (Click on the images to see larger version.) Photos courtesy Oyster.com.

Mike replies: One could argue that professional photography in general is the skill of the convincing fakeout photo. The best one I was ever asked to do: I was hired by an organization that was sponsoring a protest. My job was to bring back "documentary" pictures of the protest that emphasized its importance as an event. When I got there, I learned to my dismay that exactly six protesters had shown up. My task for the day: make pictures in which six people looked like an actual crowd. Takes some skill to do that! (I'm still rather proud of the job I did for the client—and don't forget that you can't put all six people in one shot unless you want to come back with only one picture! You can't have all the people recognizably showing up in shot after shot. If I ever run across those photos, I'll post them. They're around here somewhere.)

Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "I think there's more to the 'pornification' of things than just a perceived 'a lack or failure of documentary objectivity.' In my experience, things are 'porned' when they are designed to push the easy buttons, to gain a reflexive knee-jerk reaction. The treatment of a subject becomes 'porned' when it becomes very popular and lots of people start doing it, effectively mimicking each other. The original Detroit photos were great when they stood alone, but now that people are 'flocking' to Detroit to essentially rephotograph the same things, each person trying to focus more and more on the thing that got the original reaction, then Detroit ruins photos are 'ruin porn.'

"The same can be said of 'food porn,' where lush close-up photos of plates of food—generally with a lot of background blur and gleaming white plates—got such a reaction that people went overboard getting closer, blurrier, and whiter each time. 'Porning' happens when appealing to that knee-jerk reaction is more important than anything else, such as original treatment, or recontextualizing, or even subverting the porn.

"...and let's not even talk about HDR porn!

"With landscape it's a more slippery slope. The idea of constantly rephotographing the same scenes—particularly if you go heavy on the color saturation or dramatic B&W effects—gets you into landscape porn territory.

"The question of what you include and exclude from a shot is a whole field of study in itself, which I think may have been one of the themes that the New Topographics photographers were playing with. The subject of what really constitutes the landscape—in terms of how much is prescribed and how much we see objectively—is addressed very well in the book The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez by Alexander Wilson, a must-read for anyone who wants to engage in landscape photography that goes beyond 'pretty' and into the realms of ideas and critical analysis.

"Personally, I like to contextualize 'scape photographs (land-, sea-, city-, etc.) but there are times when it's nice to zoom in and decontextualize. The key for me is that when it is decontextualized, it's because either the context doesn't really matter (e.g., what you're really photographing is an effect of light or somesuch) or when the context is implicit (because everyone knows the place and what's around it)."

One of the things that consistently fascinates me about photography is—to put it very simply, but perhaps not too simply—some pictures work and others don't. And no one strategy is enough to ensure that any particular picture "works." John Camp and I were talking a few weeks ago about the snapshots from the John Foster collection, and how astonishing, bracing, even chastening a gathering of really remarkable snapshots can be. The Foster collection shot at left is a masterpiece of a photograph, albeit an incidental one. Why is that snapshot so wonderful, and a thousand not too much different from it so banal? And what fascinated John: was the kid climbing through the window put there on purpose? If you saw this photograph in a museum, you'd think so. But we'll never know.

Similarly, when I was reading Jim Caspar's Myoung Ho Lee article at FOAM magazine [PDF link], I noticed that he spoke about the difference between a concept and a concept made real:

Conceptual art is often envisioned, at first, in words or quick sketches. Sometimes a preliminary description all by itself is sufficient to give life to an idea; it isn’t necessary to nurture the concept into three-dimensional reality to allow the idea to reach its fullest potential in one’s imagination. The blueprint is enough.

However, when a technically challenging idea is physically constructed on a large scale, the audacity of that performance confers even greater importance on the concept. Confronting the physical reality of a simple-but-preposterous work of art encourages us to consider the idea and its implications with a heightened degree of intellectual and emotional engagement.

And yet, even a brilliantly simple and unique conceptual idea like Myoung Ho Lee's, fascinating thought it has proven to be (the pictures have gotten widespread attention, enough to bring a measure of fame to the previously little-known photography student), is absolutely not enough, by itself, to forecast success. A couple of his pictures, in my opinion, are clearly hits, and a couple are clearly duds. So—clearly (ahem)—the concept can't be what answers the mystery I mean.

Myoung Ho Lee, Tree #2

Photography is a mansion with many rooms, and I'm well aware that tastes vary widely. Some people live and die in genres or categories of photography that I just don't care about at all, although I would guess that my taste is catholic enough (or my attention dilettantish enough) that the opposite can't be entirely true. But I'm not talking about that here. What I mean is how strange and ultimately mysterious it is that you can take twenty shots of more or less the same thing, and one of them (maybe) will "sing," or "work," or have "that certain indefinable something" that makes it a successful photograph, while the others don't—even thought they might show the same subject, combine the same colors, have the same meaning, impart the same information, exhibit the same technical qualities, show the same kind of light or lighting, embody the same concept. As I wrote in an essay many years ago: "A critic might build an interpretation around a good photograph which could easily be imagined to hold true for a similar but worse photograph as well."

I like something else Jim Caspar said in his essay; it gets at something about playfulness, serendipity, enigma. Characterizing viewers' reactions to Myoung Ho Lee's pictures, he mentions that at first they look like billboards—then he puts these words into the hypothetical viewer's mouth: "'This is not a billboard of a tree, it is a real tree!…No, wait, this is a photograph of a real tree that looks like a billboard of a tree.'" Later he quotes Ogden Nash lampooning Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

One thing I like about the Lee pictures is that they're not "decontextualized." They're partly decontextualized. They play with that idea—in context, out of context; integrated, isolated; belonging, apart.

Decontextualized [Richard Avedon]

Contextualized [Laura Wilson]

Anyway, I'm glad Lee was the one who got his idea. If that idea had been mine, it never would have gotten past the blueprints.

Mike

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Jim Tiemann, whose picture of himself with his then-newborn son Andrew we featured last year, sent me a copy of Andrew's first birthday invitation, saying, "it's hard to believe [that] was a year ago!" Andrew's a toddler now. Time flies.

I had just been thinking of printing a picture of Zander's senior portrait and framing it with a picture of him when he was little—something like the above, although I was thinking of a different "before" picture, one I know I have scanned but can't find on my hard drive.

As I was mocking it up to look at, it occurred to me that the two pictures tell a tale of the Great Digital Transition in photography, too. The picture on the left was taken on 35mm Tri-X, developed and printed in my converted-bathroom darkroom of the time, and the picture on the right, as I talked about the other day, was taken with my first DSLR, which is now on its last legs.

You might not realize it now, but today's digital pictures tend to have a "look," too, one which will be subtly distinctive years from now. Just as the look of the technique of the tintypes and the ambrotypes in the previous post telegraph the era in which they were made.

Most photographs turn out to be about history and the passage of time, eventually.

Mike

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This point came up in the comments to the previous post, and I thought it might be worth moving up to a post of its own.

"Film vs. digital" has never been at issue for me at all. Rather, it's always been a question of black-and-white vs. color for me.

This is just my personal viewpoint.

The greenish light of a severe thunderstorm on the way.

It was Carl Weese who first suggested to me, many years ago, the digital would be the coming of age of color photography, and I still firmly believe that's the case. Digital cameras "see" natively in color*...at least virtually all of the cameras they've given us so far do. Color management still isn't trivial, but the control we're given over color in post-processing is wonderful and virtually limitless. Color digital printing, easy to do indifferently and still difficult to do well, is nevertheless just gorgeous—well-made digital pigment inkjet prints can be stunning and deeply satisfying, rivalled (arguably not surpassed) by only a few rare esoteric color processes from the old day 'n' ways. Color photography is better in digital than it's ever been. Certainly in terms of convenience and interpretive control. But aesthetically, too, in my opinion.

Similarly, nothing beats a B&W print from film. It's not always easy to do well; really good workers are still in the minority of all practitioners. But it's a fully mature technology and one I find to be aesthetically very satisfying and fulfilling when done skilfully. It doesn't need improvement. Really, the ultimate quality (in terms of aesthetics and permanence) available to B&W film and plates and papers hasn't improved in well over a hundred years...what has changed is convenience, which has gradually improved.

Yet all during that time, color continued to struggle to improve. Color film photography was worked out quite well by the end, but it took a lot of doing, and there was still something less than completely satisfactory about it. Cross-contamination of the dye layers, lack of interpretive control in printing with most methods, materials that deteriorated with time...I just never liked many color print methods. Eliot Porter's dye transfer prints, Paul Outerbridge's carbros, Richard Misrach's masked Cibas were the exceptions, not the rule. And of course Kodachrome was always nice, but there were limited things you could do with small-format transparencies.

The same unsatisfying, one might say resistant aspects I have always perceived in color film methods I also definitely perceive in digital black-and-white. It just isn't easy or natural. To take a digital camera with a Bayer array and RGB microlenses and struggle to convert the results to B&W is just...well, it's just too contrived for my modernist heart. Why do it? You're just imitating what B&W film does, is all. I've never liked it, never been entirely satisfied with my experiments with it, never mind the process and methodological concerns.

The colors in pictures like this can be interpreted in many different ways.

In my view, black-and-white was already perfect, whether it was Kodak Tri-X in a Leica or Pentax or Ilford HP5 Plus sheet film in a 4x5. Color needed digital to set it free, to make it come alive, to give its practitioners sufficient interpetive control and set it on equal footing with monochrome. I would never criticize any photographer for choosing any particular technique that he or she thinks suits his or her work, but in my view it's at least a little quixotic to shoot color film in 2010**, and maybe a touch bullheaded to try to wrestle digital into doing capable black-and-white. To my mind, film is for black-and-white, digital is for color. I don't mean to be rigid about this. And I certainly don't mean to be prescriptive: your photography isn't up to me, and you can hold any opinion you want to. But to me, it's not really a film vs. digital thing at all. Never has been. It's a question of choosing the best medium for B&W vs. color that's the real question.

Mike

*I know some people will probably take the following tack in playing Devil's advocate, but it's an obfuscating argument to contend that digital sensors really "see" in black-and-white. While technically true, that's not the way we experience the cameras. It's not the way they're manufactured or are set up to operate. And yes, we had worked out many of the problems of color photography by the end of the film era. But even in the 1970s, we still had relatively poor-performing color films, and catastrophic short- or medium-term failure of many common color printmaking materials was widespread (the accounts of Henry Wilhelm's epic quests and battles are enough to prove that). Color was just never quite "natural" to photography until digital came along.

**One natural exception would be, if you've been doing it since before the digital era. Another exception is that the fad style among photo art galleries right now is for large-format color film work, and if you shoot for that market it makes sense to shoot what that market appreciates.

ADDENDUM by Ctein: Re "...but it's an obfuscating argument to contend that digital sensors really 'see' in black-and-white." It's worse: it's entirely without point or possible import, because all photographic media, with one singular exception, "see" B&W. The Lippmann Process actually saw a spectrum as a spectrum. Every single other method, silver or silicon, involves assembling a color image out of monochrome bits. Doesn't matter if they're side-by-side, as in an Autochrome or a Bayer array, in-camera seps/multi-chip cameras, or superimposed, as with integral tripack films and Foveon sensors. It's all monochrome, so far as the "detector" is concerned. So, indeed, it is the end-user (ahem) experience that defines the medium, not physically-inappropriate hair-splitting.

By Geoff Wittig

I find it fascinating that very specific films or imaging technologies have so narrowly defined the "look" of color photography over the years.

The recent eulogy for Kodachrome here at T.O.P., and the beautiful examples of work done with this film, got me thinking a little "meta" on the subject of imaging technology. Not to get all McLuhan about it, but the æsthetic and perceptual characteristics of a particular film tend to constrain or channel the way we see, especially in color. Kodachrome is the greatest example of this, because it dominated color photography and reproduction for decades. Once color offset printing became affordable, photography in the book and magazine publishing industries was largely built on this specific transparency film. Photographers who learned how to get great results with Kodachrome essentially created the visual "look" of the period circa 1960–1980.

Henri Cartier-Bresson by Ernst Haas, on Kodachrome.

Study any color photo book from this era. Almost invariably you'll see the Kodachrome æsthetic: rich warm tones and relatively subdued greens, with deep shadows as an artifact of the slight underexposure required to get decent color saturation. As long as you kept the highlights under control, you'd reliably get that nice palette: lovely blue skies, subtle cool greens, and burnished warm colors with impact out of proportion to their size in the frame. To me it sometimes seemed like looking at the world through a glass of Scotch. For folks my age, learning color photography meant learning to see the world like K64 did. (I don't mean to ignore color print film; I'm aware that the sales volume of C-41 films dwarfed all the chromes combined. But their frequently abysmal color permanence combined with the vagaries of automated printing and the dominance of transparency film in publishing conspired to make them less relevant.)

Forest Drive, Great Otway National Park. Photo by Glenn Guy using a Leica R8, 90mm Summicron, and Fuji Velvia 100F film.

E-6 films began to erode Kodachrome's market share ever faster from about 1980, and in 1990 the Velvia steamroller arrived. At least for nature and landscape photography, the prevailing color æsthetic changed dramatically. The hypersaturated, brash, neon colors of Velvia and its imitators came to be the perceptual 'filter' through which people saw the world. It's completely understandable; those luscious glowing transparencies on a lightbox are hypnotizing. But it's also a weirdly distorted, cartoonish vision of the world, one that basically mandates photographing in soft/overcast light or within a few minutes of sunrise/sunset.

In the last decade we've seen another great shift in the way color photography sees the world, with the digital juggernaut. The potential of this technology for greater subtlety and fidelity seems to be losing out, at least in nature/landscape photography, to an irresistable urge to mimic the Velvia æsthetic. I sometimes shudder at the countless over-saturated digital confections published in magazines and coffee-table books. Digital also adds its own quirks, of course. Sharpening halos, plastic textures, shadow noise and empty highlights can be a lot less attractive than organic-looking film grain. There's hope, though. Excellent digital exposure and processing provide a completely different level of quality from a thoughtless default.

And we're no longer chained to the vagaries of a K64 processing plant the size of a small steel mill at the instant of exposure.

Geoff 

Geoff Wittig, a "humble country doctor" in New England, is a regular contributor to TOP.

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Featured Comment by Adrian: "Keeping with the book-theme of the previous post's comments: Here's a beautiful book with pictures about the life in Swiss countryside in the 1950s. The (Swiss German) commentary in the video on the website claims that the images were taken with Kodak transparency film from 1952 to 1958."

Photo by Peter Ammon

Featured Comment by Keith B.: "The 'Velvia Steamroller' could be said to have actually started with the introduction of Fuji 50(E-6), with its increased color saturation (compared to Kodachrome 25 or Ektachrome 64) and outstanding fine edge detail characteristics, sometime in the early 1980s. Fuji 50 was to be merely a preview of the jacked-up, borderline-false color Velvia which appeared by about 1984. I worked at Bel Air Camera in Westwood Village (L.A.) at the time, and the Fuji rep handed out samples of the first Velvia in 35mm. My Velvia sample rendered white cumulus clouds shot on a clear, sunny day with a magenta cast, so I went back to my preferred distortion of reality, Kodachrome 25."

Featured Comment by Frank P.: "A Kodak Scientist told me that in the early 1950s, color negative film was intended to be the primary photographic medium for professional photographers to use for color lithographic reproduction (i.e. magazines, books, advertising, everything!).

"In the ideal Kodak workflow, the professional photographer would handcraft a carefully adjusted and retouched color print to be shot for color separations. The photographer maintained complete creative control over the look and feel of their images.

"What happened? Clients and color separators wanted chromes. The photographer relinquished the control and craft aspect of making prints for commercial repro and instead togs spent the next 50 years in an inane game of chasing color and attempting to make their transparencies consistent and pleasing...which is why I have a collection of 025 Wratten Gel filters fading away in the basement.

"Transparencies may have been nice to look at but it's a real shame they were so popular. They stifled a lot of the creative options that a good photographer could have used to make more distinctive and individualized art."

TOP reader Mark Muse's portrait of Benita, the subject of Patricia Dalzell's portrait that we talked about in this post. (No one has ever told me Benita's last name—maybe she has just the one, like Cher or Ctein?)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Mark Muse: "Keller."

Some things are easy to talk about, and some things are difficult to talk about, and we talk about the easy things too much and the difficult things not enough. If I can make one last little "meta-comment" on the Economist cover discussion without antagonizing you too badly, there are two major issues that pertain. One is ethics, and the other is content. As far as the content is concerned, one aspect we were talking about is "reading" photographs. This is a large and fascinating area of photographic aesthetics or philosophy (one might almost call it "photographic epistemology," although that's laying it on with a trowel) that interests me greatly, and yet even here on TOP we hardly ever get around to talking about it (although someday I will finish up my great magnum opus post "Approaches to a Photograph" which has been perpetually in progress for about a year now).

Where the Economist cover is concerned, my "reading" of Obama's stance—his body gesture—is that he's listening to someone talk. Now, that could be right or it could be wrong. But the presence or absence of the person next to him pertains to that interpretation. As it happens, it reinforces it; and the absence of the "possible talker" deprives me of that interpretation, or makes it less likely, and makes me look for another one. It's quite possible that the woman next to him was not speaking and he was not listening—one commenter said that maybe he's just noticed his shoe is untied, and the picture doesn't positively refute that. But that's their reading. I can't get all the facts from a picture, but I feel I deserve to have all the facts that were actually in the picture. Because it helps with my reading.

Patricia Dalzell, Benita at Home, Hagerstown, Maryland

At any rate, I thought it was curious, in light of this aspect of the Obama cover discussion, that Ken Tanaka, whose print sale has just concluded, offered, in the comments, an extensive "reading" of the Patricia Dalzell picture above that I reported recently adding to my collection. This isn't usual, either for Ken or, in fact, for anyone on TOP, including me.

...And then, a few days later, I got an extensive reply from Pat, responding to Ken's reading of her picture. I should mention before we go on that I personally don't quite agree with all of Ken's reading in its entirety, and I have had disagreements with all sorts of people in the past about readings of all sorts of photographs. A reading of a picture is just one's personal interpretation of the likely reality; it involves intuition, experience, some detective work or responses to clues, interpretation, and maybe some educated guessing or informed speculation. Maybe even a little imagination. One thing I'm convinced of that is that some people are much better at this—at reading photographs, I mean—than others. I can tell you for sure (he said wryly) that some subset of the public insists on seeing photographs with relentless, overpowering superficiality. I even know of one critic-who-shall-not-be-named who pretty consistently "reads" photographs in ways I personally feel are always wrong! I just always find myself disagreeing. But there's no absolutely right answer with any reading: photographs are evidence, not proof.

I'll repost Ken's reading of Pat's photograph here, followed by Pat's reply:

Ken Tanaka comments: [Pat Dalzell's 'Benita'] has some overtones of the peace/love/beads/bells/communal living era. But if you look more closely a bit longer you realize that it has absolutely nothing in common with that impression. In fact it quickly descends into a rather dark mystery.

Here are the subtle elements of this image that distinguish it from the casual snapshot portrait that a three-second glance might suggest it to be.

First, that's no hippie-type thrown-together fence. It appears to be a skillfully crafted and nicely-maintained fence. It looks like there's laundry hanging to dry in the area behind the woman, suggesting a rural setting. The plantings in the lower left corner suggest that the photograph was taken in a well-tended garden/yard.

Now there's the woman. This is where all the little peripheral details culminate, as they should, to either anchor the persona of the subject or, as is the case here, to create mysterious ambiguity. She's wearing a casual working-in-the-yard-drying-laundry dress. But her shoes look too fussy for such ground work.

Next, look at her posture. Most of her weight is on her right leg, with the left receded into the shadow. This is a common, and very old device, to establish to create slight visual tension. Now look at her left hand. She's gripping that fence very tensely with one hand as if she's straining to restrain herself from some action. Her other hand is in her dress pocket. What's in there? A vibrating cell phone? A knife? A gun?

And then there's her expression that really puts the cherry on the sundae. That cocked eyebrow on an angrily confident expression is chilling. I don't want to get any closer to this woman.

No, this is no happy snap. This appears to be a carefully crafted portrait of a woman prepared to convert potential energy to kinetic energy. Perhaps she's listening to the response from her just-asked question, 'Where you been all night?' Perhaps she's confronting a pesky salesman and is seconds away from 'Shoo!' But we're left wondering what's about to happen.

The best portraits, photographic or painted, are very carefully built to use our knowledge/assumptions of human nature and/or the sitter to suggest something just outside what we thought we knew. Little haunting mysteries that tattoo our minds.

These days (the past 15+ years) women seem to have been far more skillful at such portraits than men. Men tend to shoot blunt-force-trauma sports and celebrity portraits with no more skill or depth than a beer ad. Women, by contrast, seem to generally have a far better sense of subtle ambiguity and humor. They often shoot for someone who's willing to really look at the image.

Patricia Dalzell replies: I thought the comments made by Ken Tanaka about Benita are so interesting. He is right about so many things. August Sander has been my hero since I first saw him in The Family of Man when I was 18. Of course, then I didn’t know who he was, just as I didn’t know any of the other photographers. That book was my photo education; when I went to college, women could be teachers, secretaries, or nurses, so I made my photographs in my head, and I didn’t get a camera for another 15 or 16 years. But I knew then that I wanted to make pictures that made people feel the way I felt when I looked at that book.

Benita and I met in graduate school at the University of Maryland where we studied with John Gossage. It was there I met Anne Truitt, who instructed me to look at Renaissance portraiture and sculpture at the National Gallery of Art. Art history was the turning point; it was then I began to really understand not only composition, but also how a work of art was made.

I was lucky; I lived only 20 minutes from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and one summer I went there almost every day. A professor at Maryland suggested I look at the 1903 edition of Henry Rankin Poore’s Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures. In that book I learned for the first time about the Golden Mean; at the Gallery I found the Dover Publications reprint of Composition in Art. On the ground glass of my camera I made a grid of the Golden Mean.

Sculpture began to interest me because I could really look at a piece from all sides, something that is awkward to do with a subject just standing there. My favorite piece to this day is the larger-than-life size terracotta bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici at the National Gallery. I could look at him from all sides, wonder about his broken nose, feel his strength, think about his drapery, and consider how I would do his portrait. My daughter began to tease me and asked, "Mom, are you in love with him?" When we went to Italy, I looked at the Florence statue of David in the same way. I liked the contrapposto stance and later began to ask my sitters to assume that gesture. It puts a person at ease.

An important photograph for me was Alfred Stieglitz’s portrait of Paul Strand as a young man. Before, I had only seen pictures of him in later life. This young image not only showed how he looked when he was in his prime, but his clothing in the 1919 portrait was not so much different than today’s; it could be that a viewer wouldn’t know when it was made. I could see how a viewer might be influenced by old or new clothing, look at a portrait and dismiss it and the subject as, "Oh, that was then." I looked more closely at pictures of my parents from the thirties, and began to see them as young talented people with rich potential, rather than as family saw them as the grandparents they were. I wanted to make portraits of people that were timeless; to be a witness to the uniqueness of a person and at the same time form a connection with each of us in turn.

These are all the ideas I take with me when I do a portrait. I always like to go to the sitters' own environment because what is around them tells something about who they are. Benita asked what she should wear, and I told her timeless, not trendy, nothing with writing on it.

It is so much easier to just talk, rather than get down to the scary business of actually getting the camera gear out. That means going to work, and not every photograph turns out. First, I made some pictures of Benita and her five-year-old daughter; those first shots are never the best. And then I moved to the fence. Benita said her daughter had hung the wash up and she couldn’t take it down because it was so cute. I love the fence because it creates that important diagonal line. I like a person’s eye to have something to do in a photograph and that line lets one enter the photo, if the gate were closed we'd be blocked out.

She said no one could take a good picture of her because her face is asymmetrical and her eyebrows are not in line. I told her to lean against the fence, get comfortable and take that contrapposto pose. There is always the problem of what to do with hands, but I take so long with this process that most people just give up and wait. That's when the real portrait comes. She put her right hand in her pocket, but I didn’t notice the tension on the left hand until I made the contact sheets.

I don’t like smiling pictures because the smile becomes a mask. This whole process takes at least two hours and by then no one is smiling; the relief comes when it is over. It's interesting about her shoes: they have always been a little jarring to me, but I didn’t know why. If I were doing this today, I would probably have her go barefoot, and since then, I have asked people to take off their shoes if it is appropriate.

I love the whole darkroom process from developing the film on. In my first darkroom when I took the cap off the stopbath I got chills down my back, it was so exciting. Agfa has stopped making my paper; Polaroid is out of business so I can’t do emulsion/image transfers.

Benita is a strong person, she went to Cuba when it was illegal, smuggled film out of Africa, and was imprisoned in Moscow for taking pictures. Her students love her. Since this portrait was taken she has completely changed her look; short magenta red hair, and vintage clothing. I'm going to do her portrait again this summer. Hope it works.

Ken sure got it right. —Pat Dalzell

(Posted by) Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Sean: "The moment I saw the fence in the portrait I thought of Paul Strand, so I was interested to see that the portrait of Strand is an important one for Pat. I noted that nothing in the portrait suggested the era in which it was taken; that approach is one of the reasons why I love the work of Mark Steinmetz. Again I think of strand when I see this shot of Steinmetz's:

"I read Pat's photograph in my own way and have ideas of my own about the portrait. Ideas that I feel might fall apart as I try to explain them as if trying to recall a dream."

Featured Comment by Ursula: "Patricia Dalzell is my cousin, and I have had the good fortune to be her subject on at least two occasions. The portrait she did of my daughter Lisa in the lawn chair is imprinted on my mind. My favorite thing, next to watching her at work, is to hear the story of a shoot where I was not present. Thanks, Pat, for letting us in on the way you work."

I'm a little surprised that National Geographic's "Top 10 Photos of 2009" have come under such fire in our comments. Although to be honest, my first reaction, like that of several readers, was that the set was a little bland. (Actually, that's not quite accurate—my first reaction was "I could have found better ones." That was my arrogant inner editor speaking.)

It quickly occurred to me, however, that if you know in advance that you're going to do a television show about the 10 pictures you chose, that would influence your choices. You'd pick pictures that have interesting back-stories, wouldn't you? So I'm reserving judgment about the choices until I see the show, which airs here a couple of hours from now.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons for making specific picks when you pick a list of anything. One of the major early projects I did on this blog was a top ten photographs list. When I did my own list, I was trying to cover most of the major genres of photography—portraits, pinups, landscapes, photojournalism, scientific photography, and so on. So naturally that "program" affected my choices. I was also picking pictures that "stood for" the best of each genre—when I picked a portrait, for instance, I picked an Alexander Gardner portrait of Abraham Lincoln, because it would be well-known to most American readers and because Lincoln was the first politician to realize the political advantages of using the then-new medium of photography to help craft a cult of personality. So I wasn't just saying "this is a great portrait," I was saying, "this is a famous and significant portrait, one that can 'stand in' for all portraits." The needs of the program I'd committed to came before other considerations; if I were just picking my own favorite portrait, it probably wouldn't have been that one.

Personal best
But that got me to thinking. How hard would it be to pick your own ten favorite pictures?

What each of us likes and doesn't like has a lot to do with our personal interests and tastes, of course. It also might have something to do with the kinds of pictures we take—we might tend to like photographers who do the same sort of thing we ourselves do, only better. Landscape photographers admire landscape photographers, and so forth. Color photographers like color photographs.

Our technical choices might have a lot to do with what we admire. I have a friend who's a great devotee of large format; he'd probably pick ten pictures that included mostly large format pictures. Maybe all ten would be. Personally, I realized about twelve years ago or so that most of the pictures that move me the most are naturalistic black-and-white photographs of "found" or encountered scenes, mostly with people in them; I dislike set-up shots and generic scenics. I have a weakness for pictures taken around water.

Our ten might include subjects we're interested in. A sports fan might pick sports photographs, a military enthusiast might pick great war photographs, a guy who's crazy about cars might pick some great car photographs.

Other people might go for variety, and pick "one of each" of many types of photography they like.

Connotation certainly plays a part. I've done a lot of hiking and photographing in the upper Midwest, and I find I tend to respond better to pictures of that general area than to landscapes of the Rocky Mountains or the desert Southwest, for instance. Even though the latter are usually more spectacular.

I know a guy who loves photographs of New York, and another who has a great passion for architectural photography.

John Szarkowski, the great curator and critic, reportedly had a weakness for pictures of apples. He was an apple grower and a great aficionado of apples, and it was known in certain circles that if you were dropping off a portfolio for review at the Museum of Modern Art during his long tenure there, it wasn't a bad idea to include an apple picture or two.

Depending on the ground rules, you might pick some of your own pictures, too. Or pictures that have personal meaning for you. For many people, photographs by others have a hard time competing with photographs of the things and people they love. 

A favorite of yours might be a "breakthrough" picture that was important to you in your own artistic growth. Ansel Adams had a lifelong affection for "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome," which was the first picture he used a red filter on and the key precursor, for him, of the heroic style of western landscape that he later developed into his mature style. He always honored that photograph's significance in his own artistic development.

Apropos my own ten best list that I mentioned earlier, it might be wise to separate our critical judgment from that which we love and respond to personally. There are plenty of photographs I would defend to the end as being indisputably great that I don't personally have much feeling for. (That old "head vs. heart" dichotomy.)

Or maybe not
I'm guessing this might not be an instructive exercise to actually do. That is, it might be pretty pointless to  make the hard choices and come up with ten specific photographs. After all, looking at photographs is an appetite and a pastime—it depends in part on a constant stream of new encounters, an ongoing adventure of new discovery. But it could be enlightening to at least think about it. It could tell you important things about who you are, where you stand. Maybe even things you don't consciously realize about yourself.

Could you at least think of three or four things that would have to be on your list, for instance?

I can think of a few that would be on mine.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Carl Dahlke: "And the answer is—it's very hard to pick a personal top 10 photos even if I narrow it down to the ones that I personally love and respond to.

"Part of the problem is that some photographers are easy to see in terms of individual images. Other photographers' images seem to live as an interconnected body of work.

"If I think of Edward Weston I think of individual pictures of things (Pepper #30) or people (Gualaloupe Marin de Rivera). Elliot Erwitt is another one of those photographers whose work it easy to see as individual images (one of his dog pictures has to be in my top 10).

"When I think of Emmit Gown I think of the whole extended family portrait he created in his first book. There are individual images in that book that I love—but they always are living in the good company of the other parts of the portrait. So I don't quite know how to pick a favorite—it almost feels like cutting up the book by picking a favorite is the wrong thing to do. And that book is certainly in my list of top 10 books. Ralph Gibson is like that too—his medium really is the book.

"So I think the whole question is biased towards the photographers whose style tends to produce individual iconic images.

"I think the other problem is that if you have a really broad taste for photography (and I do both in what I shoot and what I look at) then the top 10 becomes almost impossible to narrow down.

"If I have one each from Weston, Erwitt, Burtynsky, Meyerowitz, Bravo, Sanders, Giacomelli, Kenna, W. Eugene Smith, and Debbie Flemming Caffery what have I got? Well I've left out Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, Richard Misrach....

"I think it's probably more interesting to try to pick the top 10 Westons, or the top 10 portraits, or the top 10 dog pictures (where Jill Freedman and Elliot Erwitt battle it out). Working inside some sort of constraints is so very useful."

Beverly Johnson made fashion history as the first black cover model of Vogue in August, 1974. Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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Photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders opted for "no retouching" in his 8x10 photographs of supermodels from the '70s and '80s for his show now on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City. "Some of these women have electively turned back 'time,'" he writes. "In a sense, they arrived at the studio already 'photo-shopped.' And that's beyond my control. But how I shoot, my lighting, my choice of camera and lens, that's all my decision. Blame me if you think I should have retouched and retouched and retouched, but I think these women look beautiful just the way they are."

You can read more about his techniques and decisions here.

Mike

ADDENDUM: It's difficult to know what T.G.-S.'s workflow is—he mentions in his HuffPo article that a) he shot on negative film, b) the negs were scanned, and c) the prints are made on "Ilfachrome" [sic]. But in any case, there's no reason to suspect the borders are "art sauce" (faked): to quote Ctein, "A print from a transparency will always show black borders unless they have been intentionally made white. Doesn't matter what the workflow is."

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Featured Comment by Ben Syverson: "Just checked with Timothy. He shot the images on color negative (Portra 160NC I believe), drum scanned the film, and had the final prints made on Ilfochrome by Laumont Photographic in NYC.

"For aesthetic reasons, he removed the Kodak logo, notches and other edge markings from the scan, calling them 'very distracting.' He did the same thing to the color chromes on the XXX series and the negatives for the Black List projects.

"Can't say that I blame him—would you leave a corporate logo on a 54" exhibition print going into a museum collection? Does that make them 'touched' as Dennis Ng puts it? He also had the dust cloned out. Do you want to see the dust too as 'proof' that he didn't retouch the photos? I mean, even contact prints are spot toned...."